The Selkie Spell (Seal Island Trilogy) (16 page)

“I’m working on it.  But there’s more.”  Sam paused.  “She may have been connected to Cohen in a deeper way—a romantic way.”

“Then why haven’t the police pulled her into the investigation?”

“I’m not sure.  I’ve read the interviews from his neighbors and the two spent a lot of time together.  She stayed at his house most nights.  But that’s not all.  I’ve been doing some digging into her past.  And I found a ten year spread where there was no home documented, no work documented, just a big missing piece.”

“Which means… what?”  Philip pushed to his feet, frustrated that this conversation had strayed so far off the main topic—
finding his wife
.

“I think Carol Johnson might have lived in one of those shelters.”

Philip paused, his gaze landing on the antique dresser where Sydney’s perfume—perfume he had chosen for her—sat untouched by two pearl encrusted combs.

“I think,” Sam’s voice cut through the line, “that Carol might be making it her life’s purpose to help others escape, just as she did.”

Philip walked to the dresser, picked up the perfume and closed his eyes as he inhaled the scent—Sydney’s scent.

“Dr. Carter?” Sam asked.  “Are you still there?”

“I’m here,” Philip said quietly, his fingers closing around the frosted glass of the miniature bottle.

“If you’re interested in pursuing this lead, I still have connections in the Houston P.D.  I can probably pull her into the investigation as an accomplice.”

“No,” Philip said, slowly, setting the perfume back down on the dresser.  “Not yet, anyway.”

“Do you have any other names you want me to run?”

“No.”  Philip turned his back to the dresser.  “I want you to find my wife.”

***

Tara stood in a hot shower for thirty minutes just to get the feeling back in her toes.  She’d left the beach when the tide came in, when the wind picked up and the skin on her fingers started to prune.  And by the time she let herself back into the pub’s kitchen an hour later, she felt a little better, but still not quite herself.

Looping the hood of her rain slicker over the hook by the door, she spied the cake pan in front of Kelsey and crossed the room to peer over the child’s shoulder.  “What’s this?”

“It’s for Uncle Liam,” Kelsey explained, adding powdered sugar to the icing and mixing it in.  “We’re throwing him a party.”

Tara reached for her apron, tying it around her waist.  “What are we celebrating?”

“He got his first book published.”

“Really?”

Kelsey nodded.

Tara finished tying the apron and stole a glance out the window connecting the kitchen to the pub, glimpsing Dominic’s younger brother behind the bar.  “I’m impressed.”

Kelsey nodded again, still stirring.  “He’s going to tell everybody tonight.”

Picking up a spoon, Tara went to the stove to see if she could salvage any of the dishes she’d abandoned earlier.  “What’s the book about?”

“Irish legends.”

Tara glanced over her shoulder.  “Which legends?”

“The legends of the islands,” Kelsey explained.  “Every island has its own legend.  Uncle Liam’s the first person to put them all together.”

Tara thought of the man she’d met briefly this afternoon.  She knew he was a professor, from what Caitlin and Dominic told her.  But she hadn’t expected a professor of myths and legends.  She’d expected math, or science, or psychology.  Something practical.  Something ordinary.

But it seemed like everyone who grew up here had a hand in the spinning of this island’s legend.  She hadn’t met a single islander who didn’t believe it, who didn’t take pride in it, who didn’t have faith that one day the selkie’s descendant would come to the island to set her free.  Even when they’d created the festival, sensationalizing the story to create a tourist draw out of it, complete with a fake pelt and treasure hunt, they still believed in the truth of it, in the legitimacy of the underlying story.

What would it be like, Tara wondered, to have that faith, that unwavering belief in something you couldn’t even see?

“Kelsey?”

“Yes?”

“Remember a few weeks ago, when you were cutting my hair, and told me you believe in the legend of Seal Island?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever seen her?”

The little girl looked at Tara, her eyes serious.  “The selkie?”

Tara nodded, holding her breath.

“No.  I don’t think anyone on the island’s ever seen her.”

“Then how do you know that she’s real?”

Kelsey stopped icing the cake and turned to face Tara.  “How do you know anything’s real?”

“Proof?”

“Sometimes you don’t get proof.  Sometimes you just have to believe.”

When Kelsey turned back to the cake, spreading vanilla icing over the layers of rich dark chocolate, Tara wondered if Kelsey was just young and naive, or if she was onto something.  If she knew something Tara didn’t.

What if there were things in life that couldn’t be proved?  What if there were things in life that couldn’t be tested?  That couldn’t be rationalized?  What if there were some things in life you just had to believe in?

Is that what the seals were trying to tell her?  That they had faith in her?  That they believed in her?  That they were going to be there for her, protecting her if anything happened?  Wasn’t that madness, to think such things?  Weren’t they just animals?  Wasn’t that strange woman who kept appearing just a figment of her imagination?

Or were they real?  Spirits, ghosts, animals who were showing themselves to her because she’d lost her faith?  Because she’d lost her way?  Because she needed some sort of proof to believe?

No one else on the island had seen the selkie.  No one else had seen the way the seals came to the beach when Tara stepped onto the sand.  No one else questioned the legend, or that one day a woman would actually come to the island and set the selkie free.

They simply believed.

Tara dropped her gaze to her hands.  She wished she could believe.

When she heard the loud shouting and cheering that burst from the other room, and Kelsey grabbed the cake and skipped out with it, she knew Liam had made his announcement.  She heard someone pop open a bottle of champagne—probably Dominic—and the first notes of the fiddle float into the kitchen.

Tara edged over to the window, watching as Kelsey cut into the cake and started passing out pieces.  She watched the islanders gather around Liam, congratulating him.  And a small ache settled in her chest when she spotted Dominic smiling, pride awash on his handsome face as he clapped his brother on the back and then moved back to the bar to fill the mad rush of drink orders.

Turning away from the window, Tara busied herself by chopping potatoes and after the band’s third song, it was Liam who slipped into the kitchen and spotted Tara, alone by the stove.  “Can’t you take a break and join us for a few minutes?”

Tara smiled at the younger, more scholarly version of Dominic.  “Maybe a little later.”

She slid sliced potatoes into the boiling pot.  “But congratulations on your book.  That’s a big accomplishment.”

Tara waited for him to duck back out into the crowded barroom, surprised when he pulled out a stool and settled onto it.

“So, I hear Kelsey’s teaching you how to cook.”

“Everyone’s
trying
to teach me how to cook.  Few are succeeding.”

Dipping a finger in the leftover cake batter, Liam smiled.  “It’s good to know someone in the family picked up Grandma’s genes.  I know it skipped Dominic and me.”

Tara stole a glance at the sharp angles of Liam’s face, so similar to Dominic’s.  His eyes were a shade bluer and framed by black wire rims.  The crease between his eyebrows was deeper even though he was a few years younger.  It gave him the appearance of someone who was constantly thinking, caught in a perpetual whir of his own ideas and imagination.  “Dominic tells me you’re a college professor.”

Liam nodded, sitting back.  “I got into teaching so I’d have time to write.”  He took a sip of his Guinness and grinned.  “You don’t find many jobs where you get three months off every summer.”

His voice was soft, soothing, not quite as deep and rough as Dominic’s.  He didn’t have his older brother’s bulk and one of his shoulders hung lower than the other, like he’d been in an accident when he was younger.  “How long did it take you to write your book?”

“How long did it take me to write it?”  Liam crossed his feet at the ankles.  “I don’t really know.  I’ve been working on it forever.  Since I was a kid.”

“That’s long?”

Liam nodded.  “I started compiling stories when I first came to the island and heard them.”

Tara turned.  “When you first came to the island?  Aren’t you from here?”

Liam studied her curiously across the kitchen.  “No.”  When Tara turned back to the stove, stirring the pot he could see the confusion on her face.  “I’m sorry.  I figured Dom would have told you.”

Tara shook her head slowly.

Interesting, Liam thought as he continued to study her.  If Dominic hadn’t told her the truth about their pasts, then he must have a reason.  He could tell from the way his brother spoke of this woman on the phone that he cared for her.  Maybe more than he realized.  But he could also tell something was going on between the two of them tonight.  He could sense the tension and wondered if Tara had any idea how stubborn his brother could be.  “I think I’ll leave that particular story to Dominic.”

Tara nodded, wondering how he could have left out such an important part of his past.  “Do you miss it?”

“Miss what?”

“The island?  Living here?”

Liam nodded.  “I do miss it.  I love my job but living in Galway’s nothing like living here.  This will always be my home.”

“What made you leave?”

Liam smiled, taking another sip of his beer.  “It wasn’t my choice, really.  Dominic was the one who urged me to go to college.  I fought him, hard.  We didn’t have the money.  The banks wouldn’t give me a loan.  I didn’t have anywhere to live, or even a way to get to my classes.

“I’d just decided to take up work with one of the fisherman when he came into my room with an application for the university.  He made me fill it out, watched me write the essays, watched me seal up the envelope and place it in the outgoing mail at the market.

“He told me that if I got in, we’d deal with the expense, we’d deal with finding me a place to live.  That if I got in, we’d cross that bridge when we came to it.  He told me that I should never not do something I wanted to, or I believed I could do, because a few walls stood in my way.”

She could see it, Tara thought, picturing Dominic sitting at the bar beside his brother late at night, pushing the papers toward him, listening to Liam’s arguments, and then quietly handing him a pen.  Dominic would never give in to the idea that anyone he loved couldn’t succeed at whatever they wanted to.

“I got a letter of acceptance for the fall semester in April,” Liam explained.  “Before I could even protest that I couldn’t afford it, he told me he’d been saving up his earnings at the pub and that he had just enough to pay for my books and a full load of classes that fall.”

Tara turned slowly, facing him.  “He put you through school?”

“The first year, anyway.  I got a job at a pub in Galway after that, managed the rest on my own.  But I couldn’t have done it without him.”

“But why didn’t he go to college?”

“His place is here.  On the island.  When we came here—we were only children then, but old enough to work—he promised our grandfather he’d take over the pub when he died.  That he’d stay on the island and take care of our grandmother and me.”

“But… he never wanted to leave?  He never wanted to break that promise?”

Liam studied Tara’s face closely.  “He hasn’t told you about our grandfather?”

Tara shook her head.

“Ask him,” Liam urged.  “Tonight.”  Pushing to his feet, Liam drained the rest of his beer.  “To make a long story short, I went straight into a graduate program after college.  When one of the older professors retired, I applied for his job and I got it.  That’s why I left the island.”

Liam watched the woman across the kitchen.  He wondered if she knew she was still holding the spoon, dripping sauce all over the floor.

The door to the bar swung open and Dominic strode into the kitchen.  He paused when he noticed Tara staring at Liam, the ladle frozen in her hand.  “What’s this about?”

Liam smiled and walked out of the kitchen, giving his older brother a little nudge toward Tara.

Still upset from this afternoon, Dominic reached for the malt vinegar stored in the cabinet above her head.  “Can you make a salad for one of the tourists?”

Tara watched him pocket the vinegar and head back out to the barroom.  “Wait,” she called after him.

Dominic paused, his hand on the door.

“I lied when I said I was from Portland.”

When his shoulders stiffened, Tara pressed on.  “I grew up in New Orleans with my mother and father.  We lived in a house in the woods near the Pearl River.”  She spoke quickly, before she could convince herself to stop.  “My father worked in construction.  My mother grew herbs and sold her herbal remedies at the farmers market on the weekends.  I was telling the truth that day outside Brennan’s house.”